Forty years ago yesterday — Aug. 9, 1974 — Richard Nixon become the only president, before or since, to resign the office, which he did in disgrace, preempting the inevitability of an impeachment vote in the House and a lengthy Senate trial he seemed destined to lose.

It all started with a two-bit burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate hotel prior to the 1972 national election that he would win in a landslide, symptomatic of the personal demons of insecurity and paranoia that without much justification haunted the nation’s 37th president and his staff, with the cover-up that ensued — from this vantage the obstruction of justice — ultimately ensuring his demise. It obscured all of his other accomplishments — ending the war in Vietnam (after initially escalating it), opening the door to China, negotiating an arms control treaty with the Soviet Union, passing the Clean Air Act, creating the Environmental Protection Agency, instituting health care reform before it became radioactive, specifically federalizing Medicaid — from a Republican president who, in retrospect, would be far too liberal for today’s brand of conservative.

Considered altogether it made Nixon a tragic figure, indeed, but was it also a tragedy for the nation? Did it leave a permanent scar? Did we learn anything? Have those who were in the thick of deciding and commenting on the situation in 1974 changed their minds at all?

To read today the at-the-moment comments of a Bob Michel who was Peoria’s congressman at the time, or the Journal Star editorials of then-Journal Star editor Chuck Dancey, can be a real eye-opener.

Michel was truly a front-seat witness to history, as he was among the group of bipartisan legislators who met with Nixon at the White House on Aug. 8, immediately prior to his going on national television to announce his resignation to the American people. Nixon comes across as almost sympathetic in Michel’s depiction of the meeting, beginning with a concern for his family and his insistence that it’s “not in my nature to quit,” to his do-the-math pragmatism about the breakdown of votes in Congress, to his conclusion that “the presidency is bigger than one man” and that the nation “can’t afford a half-time president and a half-time Senate,” bogged down with a trial. From a national security perspective, a president “needs congressional support to be credible abroad and I don’t have it,” Michel quoted Nixon as saying. The president would break down as he ended the meeting with “I hope you won’t feel I’ve let you down.”

You can almost feel the tension and emotion of that day in reading those notes.

Today Dancey is comfortably retired in Pekin at age 97 — ask him how he feels and he says, with a laugh, “97” — but four decades ago he was very busy writing back-to-back-back editorials (Aug. 7, 8, 9) urging Nixon to stick it out “to protect the American institution of the presidency itself,” while acknowledging that he had provided “sufficient reason” to raise Congress’ ire. At the time, balance of power issues were very much on his mind, as he was wary of a precedent that would allow future legislative branches to boot a chief executive for mere “defiance of Congress” while compromising the nation’s ability to respond quickly to crisis.

Page 2 of 2 - Yes, there was scandal with a “Jekyll and Hyde chief executive” who had provided no end of ammunition to his critics, but there also had been political exploitation of that scandal by those who just didn’t like Nixon. “I don’t want a fourth-rate presidency,” Dancey would write at the end of that final editorial. “I don’t want an impotent national image. I fear such.”

Did that come to pass?

“No, I don’t think so,” Dancey says today. In retrospect, he thinks Nixon “did the right thing” by resigning, “although it was a sticky situation” at the time. He recalls most the very “mixed emotions” he had in defending an Oval Office occupied by “not a very likeable guy” who “did not look like or act like or perform as a really fine leader should ... He just didn’t have it, and he tried hard.” But there were larger issues. Looking back, were Nixon’s transgressions impeachable offenses?

“I thought so then. I don’t know now, honest to goodness,” said Dancey. “He went on broadcast at the end there and said ... I lied to the American people. I cannot be in this job anymore ... If lying to the American people is grounds for resigning, he’s the only one” — the only president — “that thought so.”

We’d say this:

Watergate did confirm that America is a nation defined not by the rule of men but by the rule of law, and no person — not even the president of the United States, leader of the free world — is above it. Yes, damage was done to the health of a republic that relies on the public trust, insofar as it translates into public engagement — how often have we heard ever since, “They’re all corrupt”? — but ultimately the nation survived a serious constitutional crisis. It speaks to the resilience of this noble experiment, up to and through the trying circumstances in which we find ourselves today. How can that be anything but encouraging?